1. Field
The present embodiments relate to techniques for dynamically providing recommendations, and in particular, information about one or more support topics that are relevant to a user.
2. Related Art
Online services presently enable millions of users to perform various actions, such as: communicating via email, exchanging information on blogs or social networks, or configuring a product (e.g., managing an advertising account). While using one of these online services, users eventually have questions about the service or they encounter problems that they want to fix.
Service providers typically offer users assistance with their questions or problems using a tiered support system. Initially, users are directed to an online-support web page or website, which includes information about a large number of support topics. For example, a help website may include a number of articles (which is sometimes referred to as a ‘corpus’) that are arranged in a topic hierarchy. Users can sort through these articles to find answers to their questions or to find solutions to their problems by browsing through the topic hierarchy and/or by providing search queries to a search engine.
If a user is unable to find the answer or the solution the user needs, the user can access a second tier in the support system by calling an operator at a help center or by sending an email to the help center. In these cases, the operator researches the user's questions or problems and, via telephone or email, provides the user with the information the user needs. However, this second tier of support is significantly more expensive than online-support web pages or websites, and does not scale well as the number of users of an online service increases. Because of these operating expenses, service providers prefer users to find answers and solutions themselves using the online-support web pages or websites.
Unfortunately, the number of articles in many online-support web pages or websites is often so large that it can be very difficult for users to find the appropriate articles. This is because the corresponding topic hierarchy is both wide and deep, with the articles arranged in numerous, narrow segments. Navigating through such a topic hierarchy is difficult, even for the individuals who are responsible for maintaining the corpus.
Furthermore, even though there are often a large number of articles, the corresponding vocabulary in these articles is often limited. This presents a challenge to search engines because of the so-called synonym issue. In particular, during a search of documents on the Internet, it is likely that that there is a web page or website that includes the same words as those in a user's search query. This is typically not the case when performing a search of the articles on an online-support web page or website unless the exact terminology in these articles is used in the search query.
A variety of existing techniques attempt to address the challenges associated with navigating through online-support web pages and websites. These include improved topic hierarchies (e.g., using navigation analysis to determine multi-topic hierarchies and the associated tagging), which attempt to address the mismatches between the mental models of the article configuration held by the users and the individuals who maintain the corpus. Additionally, the performance of search engines can be improved by expanding user search queries to include additional keywords (such as synonyms) or by having users answer a series of diagnostic questions. However, these existing techniques still require users to expend considerable effort to find appropriate articles in collections of articles that are increasing in size and in topic hierarchies that are becoming more complicated. This effort increases user frustration, decreases their satisfaction, and makes it more likely that they will access the second tier in the support system, which increases the operating expenses for the service providers.